Inspiring Creativity: Our new mission at It’s Nice That and what it means

The eagle-eyed among you might have spotted a subtle change to our website’s masthead yesterday. Next to our logo is a new mission, which today reads “Inspiring Creativity”, whereas for the past 15 years it has read “Championing Creativity”. Now, we admit it’s not exactly the most profound alteration any of us have ever seen. Yet there’s a lot behind the shift from “Championing” to “Inspiring” – more than first meets the eye.

The most important thing to say upfront is that we will still continue to celebrate creatives, emerging and established alike, and to shine a spotlight onto their work. It’s what we started doing back in 2007, it’s part of our DNA, and that won’t be changing. But looking ahead at what we want to do as a platform over the next 15 years, it’s clear to us that we need to go beyond simply championing the creative community. We want to take a more active role in inspiring them, supporting them to make more fulfilling and more meaningful work. We want to help them make the most of their creativity.

However, this is really just the start. As we step into 2023 and beyond, we’re going to be launching a diverse range of new content strands, on the website and across our social channels, designed to inspire, offer insights and help you make the most of your creativity. Also, as you may have seen, we’re now a part of Residence – a global, interdisciplinary network of creative companies – which will allow us to reach even more people in the creative community worldwide.

Whilst we’re on the subject of our purpose as a platform, we also want to make it clear that there’s another part of our mission that won’t be changing – that’s our commitment to making the creative industry fairer and more diverse. Over the past three years, we at It’s Nice That have been focused on making sure we’re representing the breadth and diversity of the creative world across our content. We know that by far the greatest impact we can have is through using our platform and championing creatives from all backgrounds.

Our team has an ongoing target to ensure that 50 per cent of the creatives we champion within our Work category, and 50 per cent of the creatives we host as speakers at Nicer Tuesdays, are from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. Between September 2021 and August 2022 (when we last reported on this), we met both of these targets. Moving forward, we are now looking to expand our impact within the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion space to focus on other communities and areas as well, from disability to socio-economic background, class and much else besides.